An attorney for Lorillard Tobacco Co.told the state’s highest court Monday that a landmark $152 million verdict against the company for giving free cigarettes to children in Roxbury in the 1950s was legally flawed and should be overturned.

In his oral argument to the Supreme Judicial Court, Paul F. Ware Jr. said there was no evidence presented at a Suffolk Superior Court civil trial that directly linked the giveaway of Newport cigarettes in the Orchard Park neighborhood to the smoking addiction that ultimately killed Marie Evans.